The first shelter that migrants who arrive in Mexico through the Guatemalan jungle encounter these days is hosting about 150 people, half of its capacity but the maximum allowed in a pandemic. Another similar number spread mats in the Tenosique chapel each night, although not with the separation that the measures against the coronavirus would recommend.
“We have a tremendous flow and there is no capacity,” says Gabriel Romero, the religious who runs the shelter in Tenosique, Tabasco, known as “La 72”. So far this year it has served almost 1,500 migrants compared to 3,000 in all of 2020.
“The situation could get out of control, we need a dialogue table with all the authorities before this turns into chaos,” warns Romero.
Migrants in America – Central Americans, South Americans, Caribbean, and even Africans and Asians fleeing violence and war – have returned to the road. After a year of paralysis due to the pandemic, experts predict that the record numbers recorded in late 2018 and early 2019 could be repeated but with one big difference: the threat of COVID-19 continues.
“The flow is increasing and the problem is that there is less capacity than before to meet the needs” due to the pandemic, says Sergio Martín, head of Doctors Without Borders in Mexico, an NGO that serves migrants at various points along their route .
Some shelters are still closed due to local health guidelines and the vast majority have limited capacity and services to minimize infections. In addition, the procedures to apply for visas, asylum or any other procedure continue to slow down and in some places the fear of the population of being infected by migrants is growing.
“This migration is not post-COVID, it is a migration in the midst of the pandemic, making it even more vulnerable,” warns Rubén Figueroa, an activist from the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement collective.
The Border Patrol has intercepted more migrants from October to January than in the same period of the previous three years, an increase that has been noticeable in southern Mexico and Panama since January.
Some come out hopeful about changes in the US government or encouraged by the end of some border restrictions. Others pushed by the effects of the hurricanes that devastated part of Central America at the end of 2020 or by the economic impact of the pandemic.
Olga Rodríguez, 27, has been walking for a month since she left Honduras with her husband and four children, ages 8 to 3. The house of this couple of street merchants who already tried to migrate two years ago was flooded by storms. They tried to ask for asylum in southern Mexico but as they were told it would take six months, they decided to move on.
“The children there were cold, we got wet and I told my husband ‘if we are going to be in the cold and rain, we will walk better,” he says. “Our goal is to reach the United States.”
The Joe Biden administration has approved various measures in favor of migrants to reverse many of Donald Trump’s policies, and on Friday it will begin to reactivate the cases of some 25,000 asylum seekers who were returned to Mexico. However, he insists that it is not the time to migrate because the border is not open.
“Wait in your country or, if you are in Mexico, wait” until you find out if you can cross legally, Roberta Jacobson, a White House adviser, recently stressed.
The changes proposed by Biden will take time to materialize and it is not yet clear what adjustments they will entail in the region.
Mexico has said that it will maintain its commitment to an “orderly” migration, which, in practice, means maintaining the containment imposed in the spring of 2019 after Trump’s threats.
On Tuesday, the National Migration Institute reported that since January 25 it had carried out more than 50 raids along the railroad tracks where migrants often climb and that it had detained 1,189 people.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warned migrants days before not to be fooled by the traffickers “who paint the world rosy” and promise that the United States will open its doors for them.
But despite the warnings, the flow increases.
In the Palenque shelter, 100 kilometers from Tenosique, they had to reduce the maximum stay allowed from three to two days due to the “avalanche” that hit them in January, says Isabel Chávez, one of the nuns who coordinates it. Up to 220 people gathered compared to the usual 100 before the pandemic.
And in Tapachula, the largest city on the southern border of Mexico and with the largest immigration detention center in the country, the situation is similar.
“There are more people requesting refuge and the increase in migrants in public places in the city is evident,” says Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, a lawyer for Fray Matías de Córdova, an NGO that helps with many of the legal procedures.
The director of the Buen Pastor shelter, César Augusto Cañaveral, had to close the doors to new arrivals at the end of January because they were full. “Now we take the food out to the street and some sleep outside,” explains the priest, although this has caused the fear of being infected with the coronavirus to grow among the neighbors. “This is going to be more complicated than in 2018 because the cherry on the cake is COVID-19.”
Tapachula is the bottleneck where two years ago thousands of Central American, Haitian, Venezuelan, Cuban and even African and Asian migrants were stranded for months when Mexico multiplied the checkpoints and was overwhelmed by applications for humanitarian or transit visas.
Now, some 1,500 migrants who are in different camps throughout Panama aspire to reach that city, either to process documents or as a stopover to continue north.
“We decided to risk for the future of our son,” said Natasha Louis, a 26-year-old Haitian who arrived in the Panamanian town of San Vicente a week ago after walking through the jungle for five days with her husband Josué and their son John, from 2 years. “Here we wait for patients until we continue to Mexico, I don’t know what might happen but what we want is a country that helps us from the heart.”
Panama reopened its land borders at the end of January, gradually transferring groups of migrants to Costa Rica. It is unknown if the rest of the governments will do the same or if all those people will cross Central America illegally. In years past, they came to Mexico on buses.
Meanwhile, in Guatemala rumors of a new caravan are being heard again after its security forces blocked the first of the year and from January 14 to 24 they returned 4,957 people to Honduras.
It was precisely on those dates that the shelters on the southern Mexican border received more migrants, mostly Hondurans.
Most of them arrived in small groups that, according to the activist Figueroa, are at the mercy of criminals who can extort money from them or carry out a kind of “ant trafficking” with them.
“We fear those who kidnap and also ‘la migra’, because I do not want to return to my country,” said the Honduran Rodríguez from Coatzacoalcos, already in the Gulf of Mexico.
The most invisible pay traffickers to take them in trailers like the one that the Veracruz police found on Monday abandoned on the road with 233 migrants inside, the majority Guatemalans.
Of the same nationality were most of the 19 bodies found burned in a vehicle near the Texas border. A dozen policemen were arrested and charged with murder.
“We foresee an increase in violence” because although there is a turnaround in the United States, migrants continue to be pushed into hiding, said Martín, from Doctors Without Borders.
A little further east of the multihomicide, Father Francisco Gallardo, director of the Casa del Migrante de Matamoros, a neighbor of Brownsville, recounted how two families with two eight-month-old pregnant women had just crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. As she said, she had organized everything to be able to attend to them during the delivery but “they already had their coyote and decided to take a risk.”
“This is a chain,” says Edilberto Aguilar, a 33-year-old Honduran, as he walks through southern Mexico. “One day we arrive and tomorrow others arrive, this never ends.”
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